Customer Reviews

The Day Will Come: Stella Crown Mystery

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Farm hand Lucy and her fiancé biker Lenny buy tickets for their pal farmer Stella Crown and her boyfriend Nick to accompany them to hear rock legends the Tom Copper Band perform at Club Independence in nearby Philadelphia. The usually fun loving Nick tells Stella he has a severe headache, but does not want to be a downer especially since the tickets cost a bundle.

However, a bomb scare sends everyone out of the club and onto the streets. While the police search for an explosive device, they find the murdered corpse of pixyish group singer, Genna. The police arrest group sound manager Jordan Granger, one of Stella's eight "adopted" brothers. She thinks otherwise as she is positive that Genna and Jordan were in love with one another. Stella believes the ill tempered drummer Ricky, Genna's boyfriend is the killer. As she investigates the rock triangle, she also looks closer at Nick's recent behavior.

THE DAY WILL COME is an exciting amateur sleuth tale as biker chick Stella cannot help but take care of Jordan by investigating the Genna murder and the related bomb scare while also having doubts about Nick. The whodunit is orchestrated so that every clue that Stella finds implicates Jordon only. Ironically the Nick subplot is the crown jewel of Judy Clemens latest tale. Sub-genre readers will enjoy this fine mystery and seek out previous Stella stories (see THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET, TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE and TILL THE COWS COME HOME).

Harriet Klausner

Fourth novel in the dairy farmer Stella Crown series, The Day Will Come's action moves mostly away from the farm, to the behind the scenes world of a Philadelphia Rock band. In fact I'd say Clemens was testing the waters for her first non Crown series novel Embrace the Grim Reaper to see how her readers would react to a novel that could pretty much have been written with a different main character than Stella and not lost anything.

However Stella is in this one, as are her farm hand Lucy who is about to marry Lenny, one of Stella's biker mates. The couple along with Stella's boyfriend Nick attend a Tom Copper concert in Philadelphia, that one of her brothers is working security and another Jordan, is the group's sound technician. Mayhem breaks out when word hits the crowd that a bomb is in the building. It seems there were no deaths until the next day the female lead singer is found beaten and stabbed in a storeroom Jordan is down a the police station begging for information on what happened to his fiance which is a little odd as everyone else including his family thought she was dating the drummer. You don't have to have read the former novels in this series to understand or follow any of this one, but you may have more of a liking for the repeat characters in this one if you do, plus there are some plot spoilers from those novels in this one. Nick also has a secret in this one that may well have you liking Stella a bit less due to the way she reacts.